Two years ago, I predicted the obvious regarding the consequences of the overwhelming leftist bias in mainstream news coverage:
My prediction is that the main result will be an acceleration of the mainstream media's erosion of credibility and therefore, its audience.
This prediction was easy, given that fifteen years ago, Michael Medved's Hollywood vs. America demonstrated that the effect of liberal elites' shameless propagandizing is to kill the institutions that they have obsessively seized control of. He focused on movies, but the pattern is consistent throughout media. The few exceptions such as Fox News, the New York Post, and the entire spectrum of openly conservative talk radio have thrived.
See here for eye-opening documentation of the phenomenon in newspapers.
Now comes the most dramatic confirmation yet: the consistently left-leaning TIME Magazine is experiencing an astounding hemorrhage of subscribers. (See
here for a sample of TIME's animosity toward Israel.)
Not only has there been no effort whatsoever to learn lessons from the consistent performance, but the news itself is typically buried. For example, consider this humdrum headline announcing the iceberg collision:
Time's Lead Over Newsweek Narrows
The opening sentence reassures readers that TIME is doing just fine, but Newsweek happens to be closing in:
Time magazine remains the nation's largest newsweekly, but its lead over archrival Newsweek has narrowed considerably, according to circulation figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Seven paragraphs into the article is this jaw-dropper:
Verified subscriptions at Time plunged 63.5% to 128,032 during the six months ended June 30, from 350,623 a year earlier.
Overall circulation has plummeted as well--17% in one year.
Usually, stories on liberal media debacles blame it all on the Internet, but this one couldn't. It turns out that many non-liberal magazines are skyrocketing. One sports magazine (Sports Illustrated) jumped 77%, while a financial periodical (Money) shot up more than 900% in a single year. Also up was a homemaking magazine, Good Housekeeping. The magazines aren't conservative per se, but the subjects certainly are.
But, you may ask, isn't Newsweek left-leaning and anti-Israel as well? Certainly,
Newsweek has its moments. But unlike TIME, it is balanced by the inclusion of the philo-Semitic, arch-conservative George Will.
